Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad has a PhD in Computer Science. His research is at the intersection of network science, computational social science and machine learning. He was a researcher in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Cognitive Science at University of Minnesota where he did his PhD. He currently works as a Senior Data Scientist at Groupon and lives in Seattle. He is the founder and editor of the Islam and Science Fiction project that he has been running since 2005. He is also an artist who is fascinated by art at the intersection of multiple disciplines and cultures. Email: [email protected]
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad A cultural shift in our understanding of the arbitration of the truth is afoot. The shift is subtle but it has been creeping up in the collective unconscious for the last decade or so. Discourse on alternative facts and fake news has come to prominence since the last US presidential election…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad For those of us who work in the Sciences, the last decade or so has been a boon to research and new discoveries. This has been facilitated by the massive data collection and data analysis which would have been inconceivable just a few decades ago. The rapid change in the Sciences…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Much has already been written about the failure of data science in predicting the outcome of the 2016 US election but it is always good to revisit cautionary tales. The overwhelming majority of the folks who work in election prediction including big names like New York Times' Upshot, Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In Islamic theology it is stated that for each human being God has appointed two angels (Kiraman Katibin) that record the good and the bad deeds that a person commits over the course of lifetime. Regardless of one’s belief or disbelief in this theology, a world where our deeds are recorded…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Science Fiction literature is fraught with examples of what-ifs of history which speculate on how the would have looked like if certain events had happened a different way e.g., if the Confederates had won the American Civil War, if the Western Roman Empire had not fallen, if Islam had made inroads…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In the late 17th century Gottfried Leibniz conceived of a machine that could be used to settle arguments so that instead of arguing people will just settle dispute by saying “let us calculate.” On closer inspection this idea has an uncanny resemblance to deciding disputes by delegating the decisions to algorithms.…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.” ― George Orwell, 1984 These days every other person seems to be concerned about the future of Islamic Civilization. From the Islamists, the traditionalists, the Liberals, the Conservatives etc. almost everyone seems to have…
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad The television series Person of Interest posits the existence of a machine that can monitor every person’s daily activities and can then use this information to predict crimes before they happen. While such a system may be way off in the future, a system that can at least identify the identity…